Raven Symone Blames Student Dragged by Cop at Spring Valley High School

Co-host angers with yet another unpopular opinion

Former teen star Raven Symone is relatively new on the panel on ABC’s The View, but she seems determined to make up for lost time by saying the most controversial and potentially offensive things. The latest show was no different, with Symone trying to blame a 16-year-old student for getting thrown across the room and dragged on the floor by a cop.

The incident, which has received plenty of media attention in the US, involved a 16-year-old girl and a cop with a reputation for being violent, Ben Fields, and started over the girl’s refusal to put down her phone. According to Raven Symone, she was just as much to blame for what happened as he was.

“You follow rules in school”

In the After The View segment, Raven and two of the co-hosts talked about the day’s hottest topics, including the Valley High School incident mentioned above.

As you can see in the video below (starting at the 2:50-minute mark), Raven said that the cop was wrong in acting the way he did: there is absolutely nothing that can justify this kind of force, especially on a child.

On the other hand, she adds, the girl wasn’t without blame. There are “two wrongs” in this scenario, she says.

“The girl was told multiple times to get off the phone,” she reasons. “There’s no right or reason for him to be doing this type of harm, that’s ridiculous. But at the same time, you gotta follow the rules in school. First of all, why are there cell phones in school? This shouldn’t even be a problem to begin with, and he shouldn’t have been acting like that on top of it.”

Don’t blame the victim

As you can see from the tweets below, Raven’s opinion is again proving very unpopular. Even if the girl refused to get off the phone and to leave the classroom as instructed, the cop overreacted and employed techniques that were uncalled for in this situation.

This wasn’t a criminal with a gun threatening his or other people’s life: this was a girl who was sitting down and probably refusing to put down a cell phone. The cop was wrong to act this way, and Raven is wrong in trying to blame the girl for the cop’s inappropriate response, people are saying right now.